Recently, I told my friends about my majoring in botany and most of them feel that is a gardening field which really annoyed me!! Therefore, what would be the possible reply to inspire and also at the same time convince to them that botany is a subject as great as others too.

It is totally wrong that people think Botany is all about gardening. It is just a piece of things being discussed in Botany. When I was a student in university, my major is Zoology. I did not choose Botany because I thought plants is boring and static, so I chose animal, which I think is more interesting. But then through my friends and my colleague who teaches Botany, I found a lot of interesting stuff of Botany. That's my starting point to remove my banner "Botany is boring"

Many researchers today turn to plants in order to find cures for some diseases. Just think of broccoli for example .... it seems it helps preventing cancer. You need botany and plant physiology to study such things

"A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort" - H. Albright

I saw on the Discovery channel a few months ago(No, this is not advertising) that they have found the cure for malaria in a plant that has been used in China as a natural remedy for deseases since Antiquity. I can not remember it's name because i could never pronounce it

"As a biologist, I firmly believe that when you're dead, you're dead. Except for what you live behind in history. That's the only afterlife" - J. Craig Venter

MrMistery wrote:I saw on the Discovery channel a few months ago(No, this is not advertising) that they have found the cure for malaria in a plant that has been used in China as a natural remedy for deseases since Antiquity. I can not remember it's name because i could never pronounce it

Remedy is call Artemisin, and is extracted from Artemisia annua. Alittle more about that here http://mosquito.who.int/. But I was lazy to do more research, so it's really not a lot